Agricultural Marketing Act Inspections Should Be Administered by Single USDA Agency

Gao ID: CED-82-69 May 21, 1982

GAO reviewed the Department of Agriculture (USDA) food and inspection grading activities carried out under the Agriculture Marketing Act of 1946. Responsibility within USDA for these activities is currently shared by the Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) and the Federal Grain Inspection Service (FGIS); GAO also reviewed this division of responsibility.

GAO found that FGIS relies on local individuals under annual personnel service contracts called contract samplers rather than its own employees to do contract compliance inspections. AMS provides contract compliance services for most Act products and it usually has employees near or in the immediate area of plants under FGIS jurisdiction who could absorb most of the FGIS workload. Therefore, the AMS employees could probably provide higher quality and more reliable services. Since testing processed grain products in connection with contract compliance inspections is the primary mission of the FGIS laboratory, it could also be transferred to AMS, because AMS has three laboratories that do similar testing. FGIS now diverts a certain amount of testing work to private laboratories to keep them under contract in case their facility cannot handle peak workloads. FGIS provides other services under the Act besides contract compliance services. GAO believes that transferring the Act functions would be desirable, even though such a transfer would not necessarily result in higher quality or more efficient services. Without these Act responsibilities, FGIS could devote more attention to its primary grain inspection mission and could better maintain that program's integrity despite staff cutbacks. FGIS already has personnel at major ports. Therefore, it could provide export inspection services more efficiently.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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